'That cut was deep': After a bitter parting, Tennessee coach Josh Heupel comes home to Oklahoma

A DECADE AGO, just after a 40-6 loss to Clemson in the Russell Athletic Bowl, Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops called longtime assistant Cale Gundy. Stoops asked Gundy if he could meet him at Bison Witches in downtown Norman. There, Stoops told Gundy he was going to fire his offensive coordinator, Josh Heupel.

The Sooners had just suffered through their worst season under Stoops. TCU and Kansas State upset them. Baylor blew them out. And Oklahoma State, propelled by Tyreek Hill’s punt return, rallied to win a Bedlam overtime thriller.

Then, in the bowl game, Brent Venables’ Clemson defense shut down the Sooners in a humiliating defeat.

“Bob had to make a change,” Gundy recalled. “I don’t know, it was tough. … it wasn’t just struggles on the offensive side. But Bob had to make that decision. An unbelievably tough call.”

Heupel was — and remains — OU royalty. In 2000, he quarterbacked the Sooners to their seventh national championship; OU hasn’t won a title since.

Heupel later proved to be a valued assistant during the Sooners’ prolific run through the 2000s. He mentored Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks Jason White and Sam Bradford. In 2011, Heupel became offensive coordinator, and over the next four seasons, OU averaged 475 yards per game, 10th best in college football during that span.

But in 2014, Stoops realized that his Sooners needed a spark. And so, shortly after meeting Gundy, Stoops fired Heupel, later calling it the “worst day” in his 18 years as OU’s coach.

“I have this deep appreciation for Josh, certainly first and foremost as a player,” said Venables, OU’s coach now and its co-defensive coordinator when Heupel starred for the Sooners. “I’ve always looked back and said, ‘Man, we couldn’t have done it without Heupel.’ His leadership, what he was able to do from a transformation standpoint to our locker room, the guts and the toughness that he played through. … I’ve always held him up here on this pedestal, from a player’s standpoint.”

Saturday, for the first time since the firing, Heupel returns to the stadium where he became a Sooners legend. In his fourth season at Tennessee, Heupel brings the surging sixth-ranked Volunteers to Norman for OU’s long-anticipated first conference game as a member of the SEC.

Heupel has downplayed the significance of the reunion. He has also avoided opening up about the firing. Heupel said Monday that he was “tremendously grateful” for the opportunity OU gave him, both as a quarterback and a coach.

“I wouldn’t be here,” he said, “if I didn’t have all those experiences.”

Those close to Heupel, however, know the firing hurt.

“I hope enough time [has gone by] that he still understands how much he means to this state, how much he means to the program,” Bradford said. “I hope that he gets a warm reception. I hope that he’s able to appreciate that and take that in before the game gets going.”

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HEUPEL ARRIVED IN Norman in 1999, months after Stoops took over a struggling OU program that had reached a nadir. Since the end of World War II, the Sooners had boasted more victories (443) than any other school. But OU hadn’t enjoyed a winning season since 1993.

Stoops hired Air Raid guru Mike Leach from Kentucky to call plays. Immediately, Leach went searching for a quarterback. He ended up targeting an unknown left-handed junior college transfer from Snow College in Utah.

“I have no idea how Leach found Josh Heupel,” said Tulsa offensive coordinator Steve Spurrier Jr., son of the legendary Florida coach and part of Stoops’ first OU staff. “But one of the really important variables for Leach when he recruited quarterbacks was, what kind of completion percentage did they have? He doesn’t have to hit deep balls. Doesn’t have to have a really strong arm. But he has to throw completions. That was always crucial in his offense. And that was always crucial in his evaluation of quarterbacks.”

Heupel didn’t have the rocket arm coveted by NFL scouts or other blue-blood college programs. He couldn’t run much, either. But Heupel could put the ball on the money. And, as a coach’s son, he knew where to go with it, too. That first year, Heupel spent much of his free time with Leach mastering the Air Raid, an offensive scheme designed to spread the field and attack the defense with quick passes.

“Josh was a QB rat. He wasn’t into going out and partying. He was a football junkie,” Gundy said. “That was perfect for Mike Leach, because obviously Mike liked to stay up late at night.”

That first season, for a program best known for Barry Switzer’s wishbone running attack, Heupel led all Power 5 quarterbacks with 310 completions, as Stoops’ Sooners showed promise.

“We had the players. We just had to get the right coaches, structure, discipline. … and the right quarterback,” said Rocky Calmus, an All-America linebacker for the Sooners then. “Josh would be the first to tell you he didn’t have the strongest arm, but he was accurate. He read it and he could put it where it needed to be.”

The Sooners were on the way up. Yet almost no one considered them national championship contenders heading into 2000. OU opened ranked 20th in the preseason polls. The night before their first preseason practice, Heupel addressed the team and told them they needed to aim higher.

“I wish somebody had recorded it. To this day, it’s the best speech I’ve ever heard,” said White, a redshirt freshman that year. “His whole point was, why not us? He kept saying it. Why can’t we win the Big 12? Why can’t we win a national championship?”

Gundy and Spurrier stood at the back of the room. When Heupel uttered “national championship,” they looked at each other in disbelief.

“We were not prepared for that. But Josh Heupel was,” Gundy said. “The belief that Josh Heupel had and what he portrayed while he was here got this whole team going. The belief that we could be better than everybody, that we could win every game — that came from Josh Heupel.”

Flying under the radar, the Sooners roared through a three-game stretch that OU fans would term “Red October.” The Sooners annihilated No. 11 Texas 63-14, then knocked off second-ranked Kansas State 41-31. That set up a showdown against top-ranked Nebraska. The vaunted Huskers quickly jumped to a 14-0 lead.

“We couldn’t have started off any worse,” said Torrance Marshall, OU’s other star linebacker then alongside Calmus. “But Josh didn’t blink an eye. He didn’t let that moment be too big for him and had the leadership to bring us back.”

With two Huskers in his face, Heupel lofted a 34-yard touchdown pass on third-and-14 to Curtis Fagan in stride to tie the game. The Sooners rolled the rest of the way to win 31-14 and claim the No. 1 ranking in the polls.

Like any other player, Heupel still had nerves. Calmus remembered him either throwing up or dry heaving in the locker room prior to every game. Calmus would wait for him to “get it out,” as the two captains usually took the field last. But Heupel’s demeanor while on the field helped give those Sooners a unique resiliency.

“He was remarkably calm in who he was,” Spurrier said. “A calm confidence about him that rubbed off on other people.”

The Sooners didn’t always win easily. But they remained calm in tight moments, especially in dramatic victories over Texas A&M, Oklahoma State and Kansas State again in the Big 12 championship game. The undefeated Sooners advanced to the Orange Bowl to face Florida State for the national title. The defending champion Seminoles, led by 28-year-old quarterback Chris Weinke, were double-digit favorites to repeat.

Before flying to Miami, the Sooners held a watch party at their team facility to see if Heupel won the Heisman Trophy. Instead, Weinke narrowly edged out Heupel in one of the closest Heisman votes in history.

“I felt that Josh got robbed,” Marshall said. “I was prepared to show [Weinke] why he shouldn’t have gotten it.”

Starting with the Orange Bowl coin toss.

“I told [Weinke], ‘You got my boy’s trophy,’ and he said, ‘No, I don’t.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you do — and we’re going to find out today,'” Marshall recalled. “And I meant it. I was dead serious about it. … We wanted to go out there and show them that we were the better team, we had the better quarterback, and you guys did make a mistake and didn’t give the right person the Heisman.”

The OU defense forced Weinke into three turnovers, including a Marshall interception, and didn’t allow the Seminoles offense to score. Heupel and the Sooners did enough offensively to win 13-2, capping off a magical season.

“We backed it up,” Calmus said. “It was perfect. We got the main trophy.”

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HEUPEL CAME BACK to OU in 2004 as a graduate assistant, working with White and the other quarterbacks.

“I remember thinking to myself then, that dude’s going to be a great coach,” White said, “just because of how he’s handled me.”

In 2006, after a short stint at Arizona, Heupel returned to OU to be its quarterbacks coach. That preseason, starting quarterback Rhett Bomar was dismissed from the team for accepting money from a local car dealership for work he didn’t do. On the fly, Heupel helped Paul Thompson adjust from receiver to playing quarterback again. Thompson wound up throwing for 22 touchdowns, as OU won another Big 12 title.

After every practice that season, Heupel spent a half hour individually working with Bradford, then a redshirting freshman manning the scout team. Two years later, in 2008, Bradford won the Heisman, leading a record-setting OU attack that scored 60-plus in five straight games.

“He was the single greatest influence in my football career,” said Bradford, taken by the Rams as the first pick in the 2010 draft. “He believed in me before I believed in myself. He saw something in me that I hadn’t quite seen in myself. And he figured out a way to bring it out of me.”

Heupel also recruited Landry Jones, who took over for Bradford and ended his career with 16,646 passing yards, the most of any Power 5 quarterback in college football history.

“He had a huge hand in all of it,” Jones said. “If you’re going to call any school Quarterback U now, you have to start with Oklahoma. And you think about the guys that he had, and just the quarterbacks at Oklahoma, it started with him.”

White even remembered stopping by OU workouts in 2018 and seeing Heisman winner Kyler Murray practicing the same footwork drills that Heupel had taught him back when he was a freshman almost two decades earlier.

“Josh really set the tone for what it was to play quarterback at the University of Oklahoma,” White said. “He set the standard.”

White, Bradford and others came to believe that Heupel was on track to potentially succeed Stoops as OU’s head coach. That all changed in 2014.

After firing Heupel, Stoops replaced him with East Carolina offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley, another Leach protégé out of Texas Tech. Three years later, Stoops retired and OU named Riley its head coach instead. Under Riley, OU advanced to the playoff in three consecutive years with three different quarterbacks: 2017 Heisman winner Baker Mayfield, Murray and Alabama transfer Jalen Hurts; all three are now NFL starters.

But in 2021, Riley stunningly bolted OU for USC.

“Regardless of why he got fired, we lost a guy that truly believed in Oklahoma football, and those are the guys you want,” White said of Heupel. “We lost a great coach with unlimited potential.”

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HEUPEL’S POTENTIAL AS a head coach is finally being realized at Tennessee. A decade after being fired at Oklahoma, Heupel has reemerged with one of the hottest teams in college football. The Vols have won their first three games by an average margin of 59 points.

UNLV coach Barry Odom, an Oklahoma native, remembered facing Heupel while playing linebacker for Missouri in 1999. Odom relished talking trash to opposing quarterbacks. Heupel was the only quarterback who talked back.

“His competitive spirit is unmatched,” Odom said. “He carries a chip on his shoulder, but he uses it in a very productive way. … he’s a stone-cold killer. That’s the way he played, and that’s the way he coaches.”

When Odom got the head job at Missouri in 2016, he hired Heupel from Utah State. In his one year with the Aggies, Heupel had recruited and signed Jordan Love, who is now the starting quarterback for the Green Bay Packers.

Over Heupel’s two seasons as Missouri’s offensive coordinator, the Tigers ranked sixth nationally in both yards per dropback (8.01) and passing touchdowns (69).

Before the 2018 season, UCF athletic director Danny White gave Heupel his shot to be a head coach. Three years later, White brought Heupel with him to Tennessee.

“We were just really impressed with the level of knowledge of the offense,” White said, “going back to his time as a player at Oklahoma playing in it and then how he’s evolved it and adjusted it depending on the personnel — and the way he explained it was just next level.”

In Heupel’s second season in Knoxville, Tennessee went 11-2, including three straight wins over ranked opponents, which culminated with a thrilling 52-49 victory over No. 3 Alabama.

This year, headlined by electric freshman quarterback Nico Iamaleava, Heupel appears to have his best Tennessee team yet.

Stoops has declined to do any interviews this week about Heupel’s return, citing the “great respect” he has for Venables and for Heupel, whom he noted was “the catalyst” for OU’s return to prominence this millennium.

But Venables said he isn’t surprised how Heupel has bounced back, noting that “he’s always been a winner.” Gundy isn’t surprised, either.

“Instead of moping on it, dwelling on it, he kept his head up and found another place,” Gundy said. “He’s done nothing but run with it ever since.”

Marshall has remained close with Heupel, bonded by the national championship they won together. Marshall, who has attended a half-dozen Vols games, said he was “disappointed” when OU fired Heupel. But even though “that cut was deep,” Marshall pointed out “it led him to where he is” — leading the Vols.

“That just shows what type of character and what type of person he is,” Marshall said. “Lick your wounds and figure it out. He just went back to the drawing board. … put his head down and grinded it out.”

The grind has brought Heupel back to OU, albeit on the opposite sideline.

Marshall said it will be “emotional” for Heupel returning “to the place where it all started for him.” But he’s hoping Heupel can still “feel the love” from a program he once helped put back on the map.